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Prashant Yadav is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and Affiliate Professor of Technology and Operations Management at INSEAD. Yadav’s work focuses on improving healthcare supply chains and designing better supply chains for products with social benefits. He is the author of many peer reviewed scientific publications and his work has been featured in prominent print and broadcast media including The Economist, The Financial Times, Nature, and BBC. Yadav’s research papers have been the recipient of best paper awards from the Production and Operations Management Society, INFORMS, and scientific bodies.

Over the last 15 years, Yadav has worked closely with multiple country governments and global organizations in improving supply chains for medicines and health products. Yadav’s policy advisory roles have included: Strategy Leader-Supply Chain at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Chair of the Market Dynamics Advisory Group of the Global Fund, Co-chair of Procurement & Supply Chain Management at the Roll Back Malaria Partnership, Commissioner on the Lancet Commission on Essential Medicines. Yadav has been invited for expert testimony on issues related to medicine supply chains in the US Congress and legislative bodies in other countries. Yadav also serves on the advisory boards of many global organizations and social enterprises.

In his previous roles Yadav has worked as Strategy Leader-Supply Chain at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Vice President of Healthcare at the William Davidson Institute and Faculty at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan; Professor of Supply Chain Management at the MIT-Zaragoza International Logistics Program and Research Affiliate at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics.

Pages

In this working paper, commissioned as part of CGD's Drug Resistance Working Group, Prashant Yadav analyzes how changes in supply-chain business practices could help fix the misaligned incentives that hinder worldwide access to high-quality medical goods.

Donors play a significant role in funding medicines and other commodities in global health. Of the approximately US $28.2 billion spent by donors in 2010, approximately 40% went towards medicines, vaccines and other health commodities, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa. The efficiency of this spend is therefore of great concern, given the large variability in supply chain costs.

In many LMICs, the market of pharmaceutical wholesalers and distributors is extremely fragmented, with too many intermediaries and small, inefficient firms. China and Tanzania provide two examples of reforms.

In early 2006, CGD convened a working group–led by Ruth Levine- to address a pervasive problem in global health: poor forecasting of expected demand for key products. Long-term strategic demand forecasts are needed in order for manufacturers to make capacity investments, make more accurate long term plans for manufacturing and distribution, and for donors to conduct better multi-year program planning. Medium-term demand forecasts are equally essential. When such forecasts are off, manufacturers have to dispose of unsold drugs; donors and ministries of health may face uncertain prices and availability of essential products; and –most importantly- communities and individuals can face the terrible prospect of shortages, incomplete treatments and the emergence of drug resistance. The Wall Street Journal’s recent coverage of shortages of pediatric tuberculosis (TB) treatments demonstrates the weaknesses –or perhaps absence- of adequate demand forecasting in India’s anti-TB programs.

Pages

In this working paper, commissioned as part of CGD's Drug Resistance Working Group, Prashant Yadav analyzes how changes in supply-chain business practices could help fix the misaligned incentives that hinder worldwide access to high-quality medical goods.